


Coordinator In Extremis

by gallifreyburning



Category: Doctor Who, Gallifrey (Big Finish Audio)
Genre: Angst, Dubious Consent, F/M, Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-12
Updated: 2018-09-12
Packaged: 2019-07-11 12:58:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,320
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15972797
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gallifreyburning/pseuds/gallifreyburning
Summary: During the Time War, Narvin takes extraordinary steps to find things that have been lost.





	Coordinator In Extremis

**Author's Note:**

> Set after _The Devil You Know_. Also set during _Square One_ , _Fractures_ , and _Insurgency._ So lots of spoilers, basically.

It’s Narvin’s idea, going back and rewriting the CIA by-laws to establish himself as Coordinator In Extremis. Romana doesn’t object even a little bit when he asks for her blessing, but she hasn’t devoted so much of her life to this Agency and all it stands for. The two of them share the same personal reasons for taking such an extraordinary measure, but for Romana, reaching back into the CIA's history and interfering with its foundations isn’t a personal transgression.

For him, it’s different. But then again, he’s very different these days; he isn’t remotely the same Time Lord he was, when he first became Coordinator years ago, before Pandora’s civil war. He isn't even the same Time Lord he was when Romana demoted him to Deputy Coordinator, after the Adherents of Om incident.

He and Romana agree that his interventions will be small and calculated to nudge a timeline here, alter an outcome there, anything they can do to keep the Time War from spinning out of control to such a degree that the cosmos blink out of existence wholesale. A handful of Narvin’s excursions aren’t interventions at all; they’re rescue missions, launched the instant he or Romana receives a report of a certain type of human, stranded out of time in a certain way.

The interventions meet with mixed success. Narvin considers the rescues unmitigated failures, because not a single wayward human they come across is Leela or Ace.

His lapses in judgment during these missions start out small and innocuous. The first happens on his way home from a fruitless rescue attempt: a report of a human washed up out of nowhere on a trading planet on the outer arm of the Mutter’s Spiral. It isn’t Leela or Ace, it’s a teenaged boy caught up in a Dalek time scoop and spat out at random. Narvin brings him aboard the TARDIS and returns him to Earth, to a country called Indonesia in 2057 local time, and when he re-enters the Vortex he passes a blip on the TARDIS viewscreen. An analysis finds an echo from a particular point in his own timeline, no doubt stirred up by a timeonic detonation somewhere in nearby space-time. He sits in the console room and debates with himself for a full span before finally throwing the ship into reverse. 

What if the blip is something sinister, and someone is meddling in his history? 

Bypassing the security measures on Liaison Officer Hossack's artificial planetoid is easy, because years ago, after the original incident at this farce of a diplomatic conference that Romana sent him to, he’d received a full debrief from the CIA agents assigned to clean up the temporal mess. That report included every security breakdown that occurred at the whole dog-and-pony show. He has always had a mind for details, retaining useless minutiae far past its use-by date, so when the access codes and grid-release mechanisms come easily to his fingertips, he’s grateful.

He lands in an empty hallway, and makes his way to the planetoid’s entertainment level, and slips into the bar packed full of drinking diplomats.

A particularly strong perception filter hangs on a chain around his neck, fitted into a Seal of Rassilon, and the metal feels cold against his skin in this big, boisterous room. While he’s confident the filter will protect him from most peoples’ notice, it certainly won’t protect him from his younger self, and so he takes up position half-hidden behind a fluted column.

His younger self sits at a table with the Unvossi delegate, deep in conversation. His head is covered in thicker, darker hair, and his chest is puffed up with delusions of grandeur and single-handedly ushering in a new era of intergalactic temporal peace.

Behind his younger version’s back, on the stage surrounded by leering diplomats, Leela dances. Her hands move at remarkable speed, spinning two sticks with fire lit at each end. She wears her leather dress, the one she favored back then, before she took up trousers and a cowl. She’s so very young – still graced with the effects of living on Gallifrey, permeated with artron energy, her human biological clock slowed nearly to the point of stillness.

Wherever and whenever Leela is now, she has no such protection; she could be dead of old age, and Narvin can do nothing to stop it. But in this past moment she’s young, and alive, and he drinks in the sight of her undulating in time with drums and stringed instruments, moving in a perfectly choreographed circle as her fire-sticks spin and flare. The Fire Dance of the Sevateem, she had told him once, but she never performed it for him after this. And here, in this time, his younger self was too vain and oblivious to understand the significance of what was happening right behind his back.

Now, Narvin cannot begin to remember what such indifference felt like.

Standing as still as the column he’s hiding behind, he watches as Leela dances, his fingernails curling into his palms every time Flinkstab of Nekkistan oozes lustily in her direction. Aside from his own presence, nothing else here is amiss, and the blip was simply a blip and not a hostile act in his timeline.

Before long, a hacked servitor brings the Unvossi delegate a drink he didn’t order, and Narvin’s younger self sputters at the waiter in annoyance. Before the explosion happens, the older Narvin slips away to his TARDIS, alters the ship's databanks to erase any trace of his detour, and returns to Romana and Gallifrey.

The second detour occurs after the business with the Doctor and the Master and the Eminence. Narvin would never have shown the Doctor the true state he was in, after spending weeks as prisoner inside an Eminence casket, braced against constant psychic onslaught for control of his mind and body. When the casket finally opened, he'd tumbled out like a jigsaw puzzle that had been strewn across the floor, every one of his bones felt loose, every bit of his consciousness jumbled in a mess of colors that didn't seem like it could ever again form a coherent picture. But he did what had to be done, collected himself and clung to his composure by his fingertips. He'd fought alongside the Doctor to end the ordeal, to stop the Eminence and thereby stop the Daleks' plan. Then he popped off to his TARDIS, pretending the last month hadn't been a nonstop, waking nightmare.

On the way home, alone with his thoughts, his mental defenses are as tattered as a ship at the bottom of the sea, and his judgment is buried in the silt around it. 

None of this excuses his decision, but it does explain it a little. It explains how his fingers seem to have a mind of their own, as they key in a spare set of temporal-spatial coordinates. It explains how his arm is entirely divorced from the enormously logical part of his enormously logical Time Lord brain, shouting quite reasonably at him about the laws of time and the sheer foolhardiness of crossing into one’s own timeline.

His TARDIS lands in a corner of Gallifrey’s Artron Forum just after the premature bomb explosion, the sound of materialization buried under a cacophony of the Citadel’s emergency klaxons. Perception filter cold against his neck, Narvin squints through the smoke and flames as he crouches low and moves closer to two motionless bodies on the ground.

His younger self is there again with Leela. He’s unconscious on his back, blood collecting around his cracked head in an amber puddle, and his arms and hands as raw as uncooked searlak. He had so many regenerations at his fingertips in this moment, and even then he couldn't use a single one because of the Dogma Virus.

Leela lays on her stomach nearby, and even though Narvin knows in theory what is about to happen, he was unconscious the first time around and right now the sight is so distressing that he scarcely checks the urge to make sure she’s still alive. Instead he waits, breathless; being here is torture, but not being here would be even worse, and Rassilon forgive him he has become disgracefully weak in his old age.

Eventually she moves, pushing shakily to her hands and knees. She reaches out, feeling along the ground, and then her hand rises to her face, touching her own cheeks and eyes. Her mouth opens, a thin stream of red human blood spilling out, and she makes a noise of such anguish and confusion that his hearts bend and throb like wild creatures inside his chest. He’s on his feet before he thinks better of it. He has enough self control to stay still and silent, at least, but it doesn’t matter if he's wearing the perception filter or if he hides anymore. As of this moment, Leela is blind.

She tries to sit up and nearly falls backward, and it occurs to him for the first time how damaged her hearing must be, how her human skull must ring from the explosive force of impact.

She makes another tortured animal-like sound, and then rasps, “Narvin?”

His palms have turned to ice, his throat thick with dust and horror. He takes half a dozen steps forward, until he nearly trips over a piece of rubble. Smoke stings his eyes, and somewhere behind him a cracked pillar collapses with a tremendous crash.

“Narvin!”

This was a terrible mistake. He should not be here.

“Narvin!” Leela crawls on her hands and knees, feeling along the ground until she finds his younger body. “Narvin, are you alive? Say something!” She touches his decimated arms and face, and her fingers dip into the pool of blood around his skull. She presses her head to his chest and grows still, listening. Then she sits up with a deep breath, her hands balling up the front of his tunic in an unexpectedly tender gesture. “I will not leave you here to die alone. If we die, we die together." He remains stubbornly unconscious. "In the meantime, Time Lord, if you plan on changing your face, be kind enough to give me warning.”

She staggers to her feet, and before she can drag Narvin’s wrecked younger self to safety, the sound of a dematerializing TARDIS echoes faintly beneath the blaring klaxon alarms.

He doesn’t take another detour for months. He throws himself into his duties with abandon, but it’s this workaholism that leads to such a state of exhaustion and poor judgment that he finally programs in one last nonessential set of coordinates. He's on the way home from another mission spent trying to leverage a renegade into fighting in this eternal war with the Daleks. The effort was a disaster, even though Narvin engineered the situation so that the Monk could not fail, somehow he managed to anyway. Six star systems disappeared from time and space as if they'd never existed; hundreds of billions of people, gone in the blink of an eye.

Up to this point, Narvin has told himself that his post-mission detours were oases in the middle of the desert of battle. He was weak to crave them. But right now, after this particular failure, he is so ragged and empty that he cannot possibly face Romana. He enters these last coordinates, his hearts empty and aching for only one person in the whole of creation. The decision is nothing short of Irving Braxiatel-levels of self-indulgence and desperation.

His TARDIS lands in a dark alley in the Low Town beneath the Capitol, years before the War. This is just a small moment Leela mentioned once, nothing profoundly consequential to the web of time. A passing comment about a place she used to visit after Andred’s death, when her grief and loneliness over her dead husband led her to seek company with those who wouldn’t see at her as alien or lesser – with those who weren’t Time Lords.

It takes an hour to pinpoint the dive bar situated in one of the dark, labyrinthine side alleys of the Capitol’s unkempt outer city. In times gone by, Narvin would have been loath to walk through the unruly streets of this place, but tonight he is clad in nondescript grey from head to toe, and the few flecks of silver in his beard match his unkempt short hair, and he has never felt less like a Time Lord in all his lives.

The bar is bigger than he expects, full to the brim with Outsiders and Shobogans. Leela sits alone at a small table in the corner, a drink in her hand. She seems uninterested in the crowd around her, and when a man invites himself to take one of the stools beside her, she knocks him over with a neat kick and sends him sprawling onto the ground.

He gets up, shouting, and before Narvin can even think to intervene, Leela pulls out her large knife and wordlessly sets it on the table, tip pointed in the man’s direction. She takes a drink from her glass, staring him down without ever rising to her feet, and he slinks away.

She turns her attention back to her cup, her stare blank and her brows furrowed. She is a portrait of ache, and of loss. The sight of it plucks at Narvin’s gut, creates a vibration in the arteries strung between his hearts, until his own scarcely-contained grief begins to fracture and shards of it prick his self-control. 

He told himself he'd chosen this moment because she would be alone, and he could observe her without being seen. He really chose this moment because she is lost - was lost - continues to be lost - whatever the tense, Leela is saturated in grief that matches his own. For the Leela in front of him right now, Andred is dead and Gallifrey is on the brink of civil war. For Narvin, Leela is missing in a universe that the Daleks have set afire. 

This Leela's husband has been killed, and she is held in utter disregard by the Time Lords around her. The exception being Romana, of course – but Romana's head is full of Pandora, and Romana’s hands were the ones that took Andred’s life, and for tonight at least, Leela is very much adrift. Years ago, Narvin was far too self-absorbed to properly notice her grief – why would he have cared about the untidy emotions of a savage who shouldn’t be on Gallifrey, anyway? Back then he didn’t know – was incapable of knowing – the agony of such loss.

He knows it now.

He’s moving through the crowd before the thought reaches a conscious level, responding to Leela’s need and his own desperate want.

Narvin fully expects to end up on the floor like the other man before him, the one who tried to bring her another drink and got his stool kicked over for his trouble. He doesn’t even know what he could possibly say that might stop her from using her knife, and causing a scene. He might break the web of time here and now, rip it right apart by opening his mouth and speaking to her. Even a strong perception filter like Narvin's isn't foolproof technology, and it relies on the state of mind of the person subject to its influence. If Leela is in a mood to see him for who he is, he'll have to make excuses for why he's here instead of in his CIA offices. If Leela is in a different sort of mood, then maybe she'll only see him as a stranger who offers a few comforting words and disappears into the night. Either way, he can't stomach leaving her here, like this, without saying something - anything at all. 

“Are you alright?”

She looks up reluctantly, and then blinks a few times as her brain comes to grips with his perception filter. The back of his neck goes cold, but the sensation fades almost instantly because she obviously doesn't recognize him. He doesn’t know exactly what he looks like to her, how she sees him, but her downturned mouth stays fixed.

“I do not want company right now,” she says, one hand resting on the handle of her knife as she turns her eyes back to her glass. She swirls the liquid, and bubbles eddy around the edges.

The sound of Leela's voice – not a recording or a data extract, but her real voice addressed directly to him – it makes his knees go soft. He reaches for the table to steady himself, and before he knows it he’s sitting on the single remaining stool at the table, ripe for a well-placed kick.

“I said I do not want –”

“I recently lost someone who was important to me, and I came over because you look like I feel,” he says quickly, bracing himself for the blow. “I’ll leave, just say the word. But no matter how much try to I distract myself the pain is still there, and it’s the worst sort of loneliness in the world. And you look like … you look like you might understand that.” He was never the sort of man to admit these kinds of emotional shortcomings so readily. But he has changed, and the woman who changed him is sitting beside him for the first time in ages, and at this point he would enumerate every single one of his personal failings for her inspection, if it keeps her at this table for one more nanospan.

Leela looks at him again, blinks a few more times, and with a slight shake of her head she drains the last half of her glass. She’s not remotely drunk, but she’s a little soft around the edges, just enough so that she doesn’t kick his stool out from under him even though he deserves it. “You look strange.”

“The lighting in here is terrible,” he says, the flimsiest lie on the planet. She tilts her head and blinks again, and he can practically see the moment she decides to stop questioning things because she is so tired and so alone, and for some reason she can't explain his presence soothes those feelings.

“The lighting is terrible and the drinks are even worse,” she says, tapping a fingernail against the empty glass.

“I’ll buy you another,” he offers. “Something better, if you want.”

“No.” Moving so quickly that he doesn’t have a chance to pull away, she takes his hand. He flinches, and it hits him exactly what he’s doing and what he's longing for, and exactly how bad it could be, if he doesn’t put a stop to it.

“You are a Time Lord,” she says, her fingers stroking his experimentally.

“How do you – how can you – ?” It’s a stupid question and he doesn’t finish it, because she has always been observant and clever, and he knows better.

She answers him anyway: “There is something familiar about your arrogance, and the size of your head.”

“Yes,” he replies, hardly a croak. Her needling of his ego is like lancing a wound, exquisitely painful and such a relief. Her skin blazes against his, so familiar and so very human. Nothing in the entire universe exists right now except this woman; the entire bar, and all of Low Town, and the Citadel and Gallifrey itself might as well have fallen into the Oubliette of Eternity, for all Narvin can bring himself to care about them.

“I came here tonight, to this place, to get away from Time Lords.” Leela’s eyes have gone soft as she stares at his hand in hers, her thumb rubbing a circle in his palm. Warmth radiates through his wrist and up his arm. “I was married to a Time Lord.”

Narvin swallows. “You lost him?”

She nods, her eyebrows drawing together and her mouth turning down again. “I lost him twice. I used to think it a blessing, that Time Lords could die so many times. Not many get the chance to meet death more than once, and do it bravely.” She pauses, turning his hand over and tracing his knuckles. “This person you lost, were they a Time Lord?”

“No, she – ah – she was from somewhere else. Another planet.”

Leela lifts her gaze to him again. “I have only ever known three Time Lords who would care for an offworlder enough to mourn their loss.”

“Now you know four,” Narvin says, the words so thick in his throat he can hardly breathe.

“You loved this offworlder?”

“Yes.” His lips move, but no sound comes out.

“I loved my husband very much, too. I have lost many friends and felt grief before, but this time, the loneliness is like a blanket of midnight, and it weighs so much that sometimes I cannot move.”

“There are so many things I should have said to her,” Narvin whispers.

“Yes, exactly.” Leela turns his hand over one more time, and places her palm atop his. “I was so angry at him, in the end. How can I know that I told him often enough, how much I loved him?”

Narvin forces himself to inhale. “I’m sure he knew.”

“Sometimes words feel small. They cannot contain everything that needs to be said.”

His fingers close around her wrist, and her pulse thumps under his fingertips, the familiar staccato rhythm of blood driven by a single human heart. Her hand echoes the movement, clasping his wrist in return. Her eyelids flutter and she swallows, her bottom lip trembling.

“It has been so long, and I … have missed the feel of Time Lord skin,” she murmurs tentatively. A clear invitation, even while she has already steeled herself for rejection, because Leela knows all too well that no respectable Time Lord would associate himself with an offworlder. Then again, no respectable Time Lord would be in Low Town, holding a strange alien’s hand, and no respectable Time Lord would be running ramshackle over the laws of time to satisfy his weak emotional impulses.

Reprehensible. Indescribably, incalculably disastrous.

“They have rooms upstairs,” Narvin says.

The beds are let by the hour, and the place looks like it. For once in his life, Narvin doesn’t notice or care or think to complain. The two of them make it inside the cubicle, and the door hisses shut, and Leela unbuckles her knife and sets it to the side.

She takes his hand and presses his palm to her cheek. Her eyes close with a sigh, and her lips move soundlessly around two syllables: _Andred_.

Narvin spreads his fingers into her hair and brings his other hand to her neck, tracing the line of her collarbone and trailing up her jaw, across her cheek, thumb trembling as it touches the corner of her perfect bow-shaped lips. She has always been so beautiful, and right now she is so young and alone. He feels every one of his hundreds of years of life, so many of them lived without this woman who has changed him so profoundly. Their loneliness is the same, their pain a mirror image.

She hasn’t told him her name, and so he cannot say it aloud. But he leans down, resting their foreheads together. While her eyes are closed he silently mouths, _Leela_ , and _I love you_.

“Kiss me,” she says.

Narvin does as he’s told.

His lips brush against hers, and she pulls in a ragged breath that makes him reach for the wall behind her, to steady himself. The sound of it, full of raw and aching need, plucks at that desolate spot inside his chest cavity and moves things around; the cartography of the cosmos changes in an instant, this room becomes the center of all things.

Her arms slide around his shoulders and she rises to her tiptoes to reach his mouth, a gesture he knows intimately because she’s done it so many times before – in the bedroom of her flat, in the study of his, in a deserted gallery of the Panopticon, and on two very memorable occasions, in his CIA office.

Her lips open and her tongue meets his, and the needy noise that comes from the back of his throat is entirely involuntary. His arms are around her torso and he’s picking her up, pushing her against the wall and angling his head to deepen the kiss. Her hands find the back of his head, fingernails scraping his scalp, and after a few microspans she brings one of her legs around his hip and arches her pelvis against him.

Narvin doesn’t want this to be over quickly – he wants to stay for an eternity; he wants to create a pocket universe to contain this moment and never come out of it again. But the longer they’re here like this, the more likely she’ll sort out who he is, through his perception filter, and the web of time will bend and crack at this point in a way that could be catastrophic.

Putting one hand under her arse to support her weight, he turns them around and carries her the four steps to the bed, kissing her all the while. She wraps herself around him, all arms and legs and ravenous want, and he meets that want with his own. He lowers her onto the bed, comes right down with her, basking in the heat of her human skin like he’s been living on a rogue planet with no sun and has finally been pulled into orbit around a supernova.

Her eyes haven’t opened since he first touched her, because right now she’s pretending he's someone else entirely. He hardly dares to blink as he reaches for the knots binding her leather dress, committing every microspan of this experience to memory. Kissing her neck, he reaches down along her thighs and rucks up her skirt; she lifts her hips and then her shoulders, helping him pull the dress off over her head.

Before he has a moment to look or touch her skin - so much of it at his fingertips, all of it warm and familiar - Leela hooks one leg around his waist in a particular way. Narvin's body immediately braces in response, because he knows exactly what’s coming next. She did it so often in bed, he started calling it the “Sevateem embrace” to tease her. The joke was on him; he ended up being the one to beg her for it over and over again, because he liked it most when she pinned him down and had her way with him.

With an expert shift of her center of gravity and a shove of her arm, Leela flips him onto his back. She’s on top of him, her eyes heavy-lidded but open a fraction. She doesn’t look at Narvin's face because she doesn’t want to, because he isn't the man she wants to be with right now. The sliver of him still holding on to rational thought is grateful that she's choosing to imagine him as someone else, because it's probably the only thing preserving the perception filter at this point. 

It still hurts, anyway.

She shoves the hem of his shirt up and makes short work of the clasp on his trousers, and he lifts his hips as she tugs them down and out of the way. He’s still got his boots on, and his trousers bunch around his ankles, and he doesn’t even have time to pause or pull off his shirt before she takes him in hand and lowers herself onto him. Her teeth push into her bottom lip so hard he wonders that she doesn’t draw blood, and then he’s not wondering anything at all because the woman he loves is here, and he’s inside of her, and their bodies are moving as she leans down to kiss him again.

He’s desperate for her warmth, his hands roaming over her naked skin as she undulates atop him. He finds the familiar scar near the small of her back and traces it with his fingers; the other scars on her ribcage and her shoulder blade are missing, the injuries yet to happen.

Her mouth and tongue taste him with unbridled hunger, her breath coming in staccato bursts as she moves. His heels are planted on the mattress, knees bent slightly as he thrusts his hips in rhythm with hers. Narvin longs for the usual moment when she would take his hand and whisper “ _contact_ ,” giving permission for him to reach out and join her mind and share her thoughts. The moment can’t and won’t ever happen in this small, dim room in Low Town, but he aches for it anyway. Instead he reaches in between their bodies, fingertips searching as she continues to move, and when he finds the right spot Leela makes a series of noises that pull his insides into a tight knot, twisting them until they snap.

He loses control a hearts-beat before she does. Leela sobs “Andred” into Narvin's ear as she comes undone atop him, clinging to him as if he’s a life raft.

Clawing for the shattered pieces of his self-control, he doesn’t make a sound as his mouth moves in the shape of her name. The moisture leaking out of his eyes is hot and unexpected, and Narvin turns his face away, wiping it with one hand while the other arm stays around Leela's waist, holding her steady.

She grows still, and they breathe against each other. Her face is buried in his neck and he brings a trembling hand to stroke her hair.

“Are you -?”

“I am fine,” she lies, her voice husky with grief. She shifts to the side and sits on the mattress next to him, leaning against the wall. Her face is turned down, her long auburn hair a curtain around her tear-stained cheeks. Narvin doesn’t collect himself as much as he picks up a few more shattered pieces, enough so that he can sit up and swing his feet onto the floor, his back to her. His elbows on his knees, he puts his face in his hands.

She touches his shoulder, a comforting gesture, and his enormous Time Lord brain traces down all the potential timelines spreading out in front of him from this moment. He could take her back to his TARDIS and, if he can just figure out how to explain himself, explain _them_ and how they are with each other, the two of them could run away from Gallifrey and the war. He could stay here in Low Town for as long as he can bear it, draining his younger self’s credits to pay for this room and the little patch of refuge, as bittersweet as it is. A dozen other scenarios play out in his head in an instant, all of them equally ill-fated and disastrous.

Narvin stands up, pulling his trousers from around his ankles and keeping his back to her. He could say something to Leela about how things get better, about the pain and the beauty that are in store for her. But those words would be more for his own sake than hers, and so he swallows them. He picks up her dress and turns to place it on the bed.

She sits motionless, face still turned down, hidden by her hair. When he hesitates, standing a microspan too long in this room, Leela does what she has always done: she saves him from himself.

“You should go,” she says.

Narvin leans down to press his lips to the crown of her head. Without lifting her eyes, she takes his hand and squeezes it once, and then releases him.

The door automatically slides shut behind him, and he stands perfectly still in the dim hallway until he’s certain his legs are in working order. Eventually he walks out of the bar, and back into the darkness.


End file.
